Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

Sisters are brittle things. God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him. One is a dainty sum! One bird, one cage, one flight; one song in those far woods, as yet suspected by faith only!

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

I’m definitely a Polaroid camera girl. For me, what I’m really excited about is bringing back the artistry and the nature of Polaroid.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Always have something beautiful in sight, even if it’s just a daisy in a jelly glass.

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

I got to Africa. I got the opportunity to go and learn, not about any animal, but chimpanzees. I was living in my dream world, the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It was Tanganyika when I began.

The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning, it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

I couldn’t take pictures of green rolling hills.

An economist’s guess is liable to be as good as anybody else’s.

He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

Here ends my forever memorable first High Sierra excursion. I have crossed the Range of Light, surely the brightest and best of all the Lord has built. And, rejoicing in its glory, I gladly, gratefully, hopefully pray I may see it again.

It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature’s gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.

There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation’s braggart lords.

While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I’m no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

If you are in a spaceship that is traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen?

When we go out to the country and just sit there, what we’re really doing is just switching off various kinds of alertness that we don’t have to use. When we do that, we are stopping being defensive. We are no longer shutting ourselves off from different types of experiences, we are welcoming them in.

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.

I love the sea.

Virtue is a habit of the mind, consistent with nature and moderation and reason.

We must accept what science tells us, that man was born from the earth. But, more logical than the scientists who lecture us, we must carry this lesson to its conclusion: that is to say, accept that man was born entirely from the world – not only his flesh and bones but his incredible power of thought.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.

Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

I mean, Hawaii is beautiful, but the world is full of beautiful places.

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

Men may change their climate, but they cannot change their nature. A man that goes out a fool cannot ride or sail himself into common sense.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.